come see my lair with its hundreds of skulls

first off, it's helpful to establish what we mean when we say boys. "how old were the boys" is another question that people don't really ask as much as they used to in this field, in part because the question has now been fairly definitively answered. the boys were apprentice aged, aka between roughly 13 and roughly 22. so when we say the women were played by "boys" we aren't evoking the kind of demographic age-and-gender category that we associate with that word today; we're basically talking about a category that exists to manage apprentice labor. a 21 year old was still a boy if he was not yet freed from his apprenticeship. this means that boys played women well into ages that we now think of as basically post-puberty, and there is evidence that suggests that boys' careers with the playing companies were kind of scaffolded by the repertory system to train them up as they god older. So smaller female roles were probably played by more like 13 year olds, and more difficult/complex leading lady roles were probably being played by apprentices in their early 20s, who in their offstage lives were probably not entirely the gamine androgyne bishies the plays often present them as.

that's a bit of a digression because it's like one half of my dissertation topic and I like to talk about it. but all of this is to say that the kinds of assumptions and anxieties that get voiced about the performance and maintenance of gender on the early modern stage are often deceptively complicated to track and map because it's all being inflected by extremely pre-modern structures of labor, class, proto-racial constructions, etc.

so ok back to your question about whether people didn't all just politely agree that that's how gender works onstage, which is a great question. I think the answer probably varied for different people. there are definitely historical records of theater goers in roughly this period complaining that a boy actor's voice was insufficient or immersion-breaking for his female role. but then there's also all these amazing moments in early modern plays where a female character, played by a boy actor, will basically take her top off, like actively courting the immersion-breaking moment. there's this peter stallybrass essay about this which I really love even though it's like really out of vogue to love this essay rn. but yeah stallybrass argues that basically out of this situation where everyone knows people will rock with a certain level of dissonance between what the play is claiming to show them and what they actually see emerges basically a fetishization of pushing that dissonance as far as possible. which leads to stuff like the mole on Imogen's breast in Cymbeline, where it's like we're invited to experience the breast as described by the play as potentially quite different from the breast we are seeing with our eyes.

and then there's also the really specific level of awareness that gender dichotomies are an enforced fiction you see in the writing of antitheatricalists--puritans who were campaigning hard to get the theaters shut down, in part because they truly did believe that parading these boys around as women was making everyone gay. in the antitheatricalists, we see that the people who are the most invested in claiming an immutable reality of gender are in fact often articulating just how socially inscribed gender is: we wouldn't need to ban theater if gender was actually real and immutable. if that was the case, dress up wouldn't do anything at all, so no worries! the antitheatricalists are not really "aware" that gender is an enforced fiction, per se, although they are accidentally demonstrating that fact constantly. and I think this goes to show that there are also many people in the audience who are rejecting the basic premise that gender norms are socially inscribed, like, so hard that they're writing a million pamphlets about it.

anyways iirc bloom's point (and I have a lot of issues with this book, but she's done other stuff that I like a lot and is also a very nice lady so I don't wanna rag on her too hard) is less that the squeaky voices challenge the gender norms that women's voices are high and men's voices are low and more that the squeaky voices challenge the gender norm that men have mastery over their own voices and bodies. and it gets at a lot of stuff that I only half remember about the status of voice in this period, which was also pretty idiosyncratic. in part due to the fucking obsession in this period with performances of rhetoric. but I think the question you're asking here--like, to what extent is the boy actress's performance accepted as conventional and what aspects of these performances can be kind of comfortably re-inscribed by the audience's collectively held gender norms--is way more interesting anyway. and in fact this is a question that I think the field is really wrestling with finding new way to ask right now. because the established way for thinking about "how convincing were the boys as actresses?" has for so long been this very cis and normative framework of "transvestism," with a real fixation on like ~the body beneath~ etc (this is why many people don't like that stallybrass essay anymore, incidentally). so people in the emerging field of early modern trans studies are looking for new ways of understanding the relationship between socially constructed gender norms and boys who played women onstage.